All these acts were known to be so just and salutary, that it was hoped they would at once meet the unanimous approval of the English king and his council. But they were all, or nearly all, negatived by the council; and the king himself, though he gave his assent to all the others, rejected that repealing the law of Poyning. It had met with great opposition in the upper house of the Irish Parliament, for though it was a law which placed Ireland under the complete legislative control of England, there was in the "higher estate" then, as to-day, a spirit of subserviency to the English interest, and the king was as jealous of his royal prerogatives as any of his predecessors. But this act was afterwards repealed, when nearly one hundred years more of bitter experience had proved its ruinous effect on the country, and eighteen years of unparalleled prosperity was the consequence. This subject is, however, out of the course of our narrative, and is only referred to as showing that the repeal of Poyning's law did not originate with Grattan or the volunteers of 1782, but had been the principal object of the statesmen of ante-Jacobite times, as the repeal of the Union has been in our own days. No body of legislators ever understood the wants of a country better than that parliament did the necessities of Ireland. And well might they understand them, for their impoverished country and broken fortunes bore striking and melancholy evidence of the evil effects of foreign legislation aided by a subsidized native oligarchy inimical to every interest but their own. For three generations the people had known no respite from robbery and proscription. Over two hundred thousand of them had passed into exile, or had been consigned to penal servitude in the colonies within the last fifty years. Then, as to-day, the population, though small, was deemed "surplus," while outlawry and banishment suppressed all manifestations of a national spirit. The chiefs were detached from their clans, and the clans, in losing their former protectors, had found but deadly enemies in their new taskmasters. The old feudal system was nearly extinct, even in the districts least visited by English adventure, and this Parliament had realized the stern necessity of reconstructing a nation out of the elements at its disposal. The troubles that surrounded the king gave it a temporary power, which it wielded for the removal of grievances becoming chronic in the land, but "no act of a proscriptive or retaliatory character stains the parliamentary records of that period."[6]